Elsevier covers, I miss you

So Elsevier used to supply free sample covers for the journals they published. They even supplied them in several very convenient machine-useable ways.

This was nice! Most publishers don’t do that, although it really is a win/win for everyone, we can use them to publisize their journals, our users get friendlier displays, etc. It was a rare case of me being grateful to Elsevier for something.

Have been for at least three weeks. Did they mean to take these away? Then why is the main page still there? Is it a bug? Then can they give me covers back? I filed a support question with Elsevier three weeks ago asking this, have yet to hear back. (I did get an email asking me to rate my satisfaction with customer service. “What could we have done better?” “Answered my question, or at least sent me an email saying you are looking into it.”)

So, sometimes putting something on this blog magically embaresses a company enough to get them to actually respond. Or sometimes one of my readers knows. Any ideas?

Thanks Stephen. The thing is, the old location had then individually on elsevier’s web server, file names by ISSN. I actually preferred that, because what I was doing was checking on demand for availability, then just linking to it on elsevier’s site. I don’t actually want to download and host them all myself, I liked being able to img src pointing at elsevier’s site.

Jodi told me Elsevier was asking people what APIs they wanted — all I wanted was that simple ‘api’ they had before, letting me look up img availability via HTTP and src link to the image on elsevier’s site.

Seems silly to call that an ‘api’, but it’s actually a perfect example of a simple REST api, that’s the trick about REST apis, when they’re done well, they’re just the web.

A colleague forwarded to me your blogpost. You are right: “sometimes putting something on this blog magically embaresses a company enough to get them to actually respond.”

The good news is that this way of providing covers to our customers will continue to exist. The server that hosted these covers was decommissioned, and the covers moved to another server. Unfortunately something went wrong in our internal communication processes and the links on the webpage weren’t redirected to the new server.

We’re working to resolve the situation and I will post another response when the page is up and running again.